At a Food Growing in Schools Task Force conference the other week, there was something of a minor spat about the 3Rs, and the word "wroughting", a concept I first came across in the context of Industry Year, in 1986. Was it, or wasn't it, one of the original Rs? This is Christopher Frayling ...
The three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic are really, in terms of fundamental skills, the two Rs of reading and writing (literacy) and arithmetic (numeracy). There is and was a third R and it is called wroughting. Reading, wroughting, arithmetic. Literacy, creativity through making, numeracy. The basis of any well-rounded education. Educationalists have written a lot about this, since the days of William Morris and co: the intelligence of feeling, the psycho-genetic educational principle, experiential learning, ways of enhancing motivation for the more practically-minded students and so on. And yet, in hard times, all this is forgotten or dismissed as trendy theorising.
He goes on ...
Well, it certainly wasn’t theoretics with me. I can still vividly remember the moment, when I was just seven years old, when I successfully produced a piece of multi-coloured weaving on a loom under the supervision of the elderly lady who was teaching us. The sense of achievement. The sense that intention could actually lead to realisation, learning all sorts of things along the way. The sense that technical constraints could be reassuring. That there were, sometimes, answers rather than just endless questions. And where the big questions were concerned, it wasn’t a question of learning what the teachers said (‘don’t do as I do, do as I say,’ said the geography master); it was a question of discovering things for oneself and thus internalising them. I still carry those messages.
Not a worldview that rests easy in current times which owe more to Thomas Gradgrind than William Morris.
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